The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Buster Keaton, with Clyde Bruckman · a film · 1926 · about 75 to 80 minutes · freely drawn from William Pittenger’s account of the Andrews Raid of April 1862
Mode
Silent feature comedy built as a historical reconstruction; one chase in two mirrored halves
Mythos
The slighted youth who proves himself by a quest into enemy country, the rescue of the captive maiden and the recovery of the stolen treasure
Phase
Spring 1861 in Marietta, Georgia; a year later, a chase north by day into night and rain, a chase south by day, a burning bridge, a battle and a commission
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 75 to 80 minutes at silent speeds, full silent aperture, few English intertitles; wide held frames, stunts run without a cut, locomotives at speed
Register
From a lover’s sulk on a moving drive rod to a locomotive going down through a burning bridge; comedy and death under one physics, and a face that does not move
Scale
One engineer, two locomotives, one line of track and two armies
Governing Proposition
An engineer of the Western and Atlantic, turned away by the army and so by the woman he courts, chases the Union agents who have stolen his locomotive, and her with it, north into enemy country, and brings both back south along the same line with the enemy behind him. The wager of the film is that a comedy can carry the scale and the danger of an epic, every gag arising from the physics of real machines, and that a man who meets an indifferent world with attention alone is a hero the world does not see.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in Marietta, Georgia, in the spring of 1861. Johnnie Gray is an engineer on the Western and Atlantic, and his locomotive is called the General. An early title sets out the two loves of his life: “his engine and”, and then the picture of Annabelle Lee. He courts her in a small Southern town, with her father and her brother at hand, and the courtship plays as ordinary comedy. Nothing in it seems to bear weight. Every element of it will be spent before the end.
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman directed the film, and Keaton plays Johnnie. It was produced by Buster Keaton Productions, with Joseph M. Schenck presenting, and distributed by United Artists. Marion Mack plays Annabelle, Glen Cavender Captain Anderson and Jim Farley General Thatcher. The story is drawn freely from William Pittenger’s account of the Andrews Raid of April 1862, the “Great Locomotive Chase”, and the film tells it from the footplate of the engine that is stolen.
The work judged here is the film as released, complete, in black and white and the full silent frame, with English intertitles, about 75 to 80 minutes depending on the speed of projection. There is one version, and no cut is in question. The film is the work, not any of the several scores written for later releases and restorations. Its titles are few, because the action is legible, and its plan is plain: a prologue in Marietta, a chase north, and a chase south along the same line that answers it obstacle for obstacle.
Movement II
Fort Sumter is fired on, and the war comes to Marietta. Johnnie goes to the recruiting office to enlist and is turned away. No one tells him why. He is worth more to the South as an engineer than as a soldier, and the reason is kept from him, so that what he is valued for is the one thing he cannot offer as proof.
Annabelle will not speak to him, she tells him, “until you are in uniform”. Her condition and the army’s refusal between them set the film going: from here on everything Johnnie does is a proof he does not know he is giving, to a woman who has turned him away, of a courage the army has already declined to use.
He sits down on the coupling rod of the General to sulk, and the engine moves off. He is carried through the yard on it, forlorn, without noticing that he is moving. Keaton holds his face still through all of it. The posture is the film’s in small: a man carried by machinery he does not attend to, and kept safe by his attention to the one thing in front of him.
Movement III
A year later Union agents under Captain Anderson steal the General, with Annabelle aboard, and run north. Johnnie goes after them on foot, then on a handcar, then on a high-wheeled bicycle, and at last in another locomotive, the Texas. The agents throw down ties and uncouple cars behind them, and each obstacle is met and passed by a man too intent on the next one to be afraid.
A cannon rides on a flatcar on his train, and as the train runs its barrel sinks until it points straight at him. Then the line curves, and the shot goes on past him to the enemy ahead. The locomotives at speed are filmed broad, so that their mass is felt, and the camera stands back and lets each stunt run without a cut.
Johnnie chops wood on the tender with his back to the line, and behind him the Confederate army retreats past in its thousands. Then the Union army advances past him the other way. He sees neither. The war moves round him in indifference, and he is carried into enemy country without knowing that he has crossed into it. Night falls, and the rain begins.
Movement IV
In enemy country, in the storm and the forest, Johnnie hides under a table where Union officers lay their plans. A cigar burns through the cloth above his head. He hears the plan of attack that the battle at the end will settle. The hinge of the film is a man lying still, in the dark, where the enemy talks.
He finds Annabelle a prisoner and gets her out in a sack. Then he takes back the General. The pursuer becomes the pursued, and the chase that ran north by day into night runs south by day again, with both his loves aboard and the Union train behind him on the same line.
Going south the film turns its first half inside out. The ties, the uncoupled cars and the cannon that were thrown at Johnnie going north are now what he throws at the enemy, and his competence shows in his having learned the world he passed through. Annabelle helps in the cab, sweeping it and feeding the firebox to comic effect. On the cowcatcher, as a tie lies across the rails ahead, Johnnie lifts another and throws it to knock the first away.
Movement V
Johnnie sets fire to the bridge over the Rock River behind him. The Union general orders the Texas across it, and the burning trestle gives way, and the locomotive goes down through it into the river in one unbroken shot. It is the summit of the film, comic and terrible at once: a commander’s certainty and a machine’s weight, and the physics that does not care about either.
A battle follows at the river, with men shot and falling. A sword flies from Johnnie’s hand and kills a sniper, by the same law as the cannon that missed him on the curve. For his part in the day he is given a commission, and the uniform Annabelle asked for comes to him at last as a reward rather than a proof. The film ends on a salute and a kiss, the two loves recovered together.
The film was out of view for some two decades after its release, and the critical revival of Keaton from the 1950s made it his monument; James Agee’s essay on silent comedy came in 1949, and it has been shown continuously since. What has aged is its romance of the Confederate uniform, which reads now as a period attitude, with the slavery the war turned on nowhere in the frame. What has lasted is a shape: one line of track run twice, and a man whose still face meets a world that runs on without him.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, and the subtractive test barely bites. Every element of the prologue is spent later. The two loves, set in an early title as “his engine and” Annabelle’s picture, are taken together and recovered together; the recruiting office’s refusal and Annabelle’s condition make the whole chase a proof Johnnie does not know he is giving. The chase north and the chase south are one design, so that the ties, the uncoupled cars and the cannon going north return reversed going south. The night in enemy country is the hinge: under the Union table Johnnie hears the plan the battle will settle. What gives is small. Annabelle’s comic stoking runs long, and the closing battle repeats its business before the commission.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Disclosure through image and action is credited in full, and what is disclosed holds: devotion and competence are a heroism the world does not see, and the machinery of war moves round the individual in indifference. The second is the film’s sharpest image: Johnnie chopping wood on the tender, his back to the line, while the Confederate army retreats past behind him and then the Union army advances, and he sees neither. Two things hold it well below the gate. The disclosure is of a stance more than an articulated condition: we learn how Johnnie meets the world, not what it is to be him. And the film takes the Confederate side as a romance of uniform and sweetheart, with the slavery the war turned on wholly absent, a concealment as well as an omission.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Elevation here is grandeur held with laughter, and it recurs. The locomotives at speed through open country, filmed broad so their mass is felt; the cannon on its flatcar, its barrel sinking until it points at Johnnie, and the curve of the line carrying him clear as the shot goes on to the enemy; Johnnie on the cowcatcher throwing one tie to knock another from the rails; the armies passing behind him in their thousands; and the burning bridge, where the Texas goes down through the trestle into the river in one unbroken shot, comic and terrible at once. Held below the top: the elevation is mostly a spectacle of scale and timing, astonishing more often than moving, and the prologue and the battle are level.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The myth is built from the oldest comic matter: the slighted youth who proves himself to the beloved and the tribe by a quest into enemy country, the rescue of the captive maiden and the recovery of the stolen treasure. The pattern is built into the structure and bears its load: out by day, into darkness and storm, a hiding place under the enemy’s table, and back by day with both loves, to be honoured with a commission and a sword, as the quest ends in the king’s reward. The particular stays particular: a locomotive with a name, a girl who sweeps the cab, a Southern town. Held below the gate because the archetype is kept at comic height and opens onto nothing deeper: Johnnie is proved by the quest, not changed by it, and the war is a stage.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance was American slapstick, in which story is a clothesline for gags and the world bends to the comedian. The departure: a feature-length comedy built as a historical reconstruction, its look drawn from Civil War photographs, in which every gag arises from the physics of real machines, the story is a single action with no slack, and the comedian is subject to the world rather than master of it. The stake was the largest of Keaton’s career: an epic’s budget, a locomotive sent down through a bridge into a river, a hero on the losing side, a comedy that kills men on screen. Held at the bar because the turn was prepared by his own Our Hospitality (1923), a period comedy on a train, and The Navigator (1924), a comedy of a man and a machine.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that a body really did these things in a world that does not care. The wide, held frame is the instrument. The camera stands back and lets the stunt run without a cut, so that Johnnie, the train and the hazard are seen in one image and known to have been done; cut into close-ups and inserts, the knowledge would be trickery. The mirrored chases are form as meaning: the world going north is the world going south with its obstacles reversed, and Johnnie’s competence is his learning it. The still face is the form of the stance, attention without display. Held a step from the top because the prologue and the battle are told in an ordinary manner, where the form is a container.
Score: 8.9 / 10
A century of return, most of it since the 1950s, is evidence: James Agee’s essay on silent comedy (1949), Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clowns, and a substantial literature on Keaton’s construction of gags. The formal yield is near inexhaustible: the geometry of the gags, the use of depth along the line of track, the timing of entrances across the frame, the symmetry of the halves. The semantic yield is narrower, and few readings stay open: the stoic hero before an indifferent universe; the comedy of competence; and the politics of a Confederate hero, which modern viewers raise and the film does not answer. Once the stance is grasped, a return is chiefly to the craft and the timing, which keep giving, rather than to a meaning that reopens.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Dated 1926, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the cinema of the 1920s. The force: the film showed that physical comedy could carry the scale and the realism of an epic and stay comedy, and it set the gag inside a world of real mass and danger. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: at release the reach was close to nil, and Hollywood comedy turned to sound and the spoken joke. The reach came later and is discounted for its delay: the critical revival of Keaton from the 1950s, which made this film his monument; the action cinema of the stunt really performed, Jackie Chan’s above all, which has acknowledged Keaton; and with it the long chase on a moving vehicle as a form. The reach is wide, but late.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Survival weighed in order. Form: the film survives whole in its released version; no reel is lost, and restorations are repair. Presence: out of view for some two decades after release, then continuously exhibited from the revival on, and widely. Surface: physical comedy and real machines have aged less than most of their decade’s surfaces; what is fixed to its moment is the Lost Cause romance of the Confederate uniform, which reads now as a period attitude and costs the film with some viewers. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. Close to a hundred years of survival, with a presence as wide as this, would carry more even with the early eclipse and the dated surface charged; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The making bears weight throughout, and much of it is the timing and position of a body in a frame. Keaton holds his face still while the body does everything: the running, the leap from tender to cars, the tie thrown from the cowcatcher. The staging is in depth along the line of track, so that pursuer and pursued, armies and obstacles, are read at once, and the trains and the country are photographed wide and clear. The gags are engineered, the cannon, the uncoupled car, the bridge, each built so the physics is true. The costs: Marion Mack’s Annabelle is a serviceable foil with broad business; the battle is staged with less precision than the chase; the prologue’s titles are perfunctory. Sunrise, its contemporary, stands at 9.1 for a wider range: light, design and interiority are not this film’s field.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the drive-rod scene, a lover’s sulk carried off by a moving engine, and the battle at the Rock River, with men shot and the Texas sinking in flames. One law governs both: the world is a mechanism that runs whether or not one attends to it, and the hero survives by attention to the one thing in front of him while the rest passes unseen. The engine carries Johnnie in his grief as the war carries him north unnoticing; the sword that flies from his hand and kills a sniper obeys the law of the cannon that misses him on the curve. The strain: the prologue’s romance and the closing battle loosen the law into convention, and a death on screen passes as quickly as a gag.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held: the couple and the courtship; labour, in Johnnie’s work as an engineer, the knowledge of a trade the film turns into heroism; the machine, the locomotive as both tool and beloved; war and the state, in the recruiting office, the armies, the generals and the plan of attack; the landscape of rivers, forests and storm; the community of a Southern town. The chase integrates them. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is shown only as a stance; the family is Annabelle’s father and brother, sketched; history is a costume, its causes absent; the sacred is absent; the war is a field for the action rather than an order the film enters. The form is fast and narrow by design, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.0, then The Living Form at 8.9, then The Inevitable and The Imperishable at 8.8. A making in which a body is set and timed in a wide frame along a line of track; a form in which the stunt run without a cut and the two mirrored chases are what the film knows; a structure in which every element of the prologue is spent and almost nothing could be taken out; and a film that survives whole as released and has been shown continuously since its revival.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the couple, labour, the machine, war and the state, the landscape and a Southern town are held through the chase, but consciousness is a stance, the family a sketch, history a costume and the sacred absent. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 7.9: what is disclosed is a stance before an indifferent world, and the film empties the war it romanticises of its cause. Then The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3: a meaning narrower than the craft, and a reach that was nil at release and came decades late; and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, a quest built into the structure but kept at comic height.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 and The Unconcealment at 7.9 fall short of it: the quest is kept at comic height, the reach came decades late, and what is disclosed is a stance, in a war emptied of its cause. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, which stands at 8.5, below the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The General as released, complete, in black and white with English intertitles, about 75 to 80 minutes depending on the speed of projection, from the prologue in Marietta to the salute and the kiss at the end: directed by Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, produced by Buster Keaton Productions with Joseph M. Schenck presenting and distributed by United Artists, with Keaton as Johnnie Gray, Marion Mack as Annabelle Lee, Glen Cavender as Captain Anderson and Jim Farley as General Thatcher. There is one version, and no cut is in question. The film is the work; the scores written for later releases and restorations are not the object and are neither credited nor charged. William Pittenger’s account of the Andrews Raid is a source, not part of the work. No print, script or title list was consulted. Intertitles are quoted only where their words are certain, and the early title on Johnnie’s two loves is quoted in part. Facts that could not be verified, among them the dates of the first showing and of the American release, the writing and photography credits, where the film was shot, how the bridge shot was made and what it cost, the notices and returns at release and their effect on Keaton’s independence, whose Civil War photographs shaped its look, its copyright status, particular studies of it and particular later films that took up its form, and its places in registries and polls, are not given.